How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  Mabel liked to talk. She was an avid tennis player and wasn’t sure how she was going to keep that up here in Manhattan, but there had to be a way. New York was very different from Chicago, but they were both big cities and she was used to that, and she was very committed to seeking out the city experiences she liked best—browsing in bookstores, hearing authors speak, eating in wonderful restaurants, shopping in fine stores, finding the best places to watch sunsets, and listening to beautiful music. Did Sheldon like music? She was mad for it. Mabel was certain that if there was a universal language it would have to be music. Didn’t he agree? What else could it be? Music is math and vibration. Did he know about Albert Einstein? He said everything is vibration. She wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it seemed to suggest that everything was music—just vibrations and someone to appreciate them. That was a whole universe in itself. Isn’t that interesting? How big and how small a universe can be at the same time?

  Sheldon was enraptured by her mind, by her acuity, by her expansive curiosity, by the shape of her ass and the sway in her walk, by the look in her eyes when they fell on something worth seeing—a look so charismatic that it stole the show from whatever had inspired her.

  They took many more walks, finding that the act of walking was a stimulant to conversation.

  It was when Mabel suggested they attend a movie that a new domain of conversation began. She had been shocked to learn he hadn’t attended one since 1936.

  “You were ten years old,” she said. They were at a coffee shop sitting in a booth, he with coffee and she with tea and lemon.

  He said he’d gone with both his parents, a family event on a weekend. They saw Shirley Temple in Captain January. It was about an orphan girl who lives in a lighthouse with a kindly old sailor. In retrospect, it was an odd premise.

  “And that was the last time?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was a million years ago.”

  Sheldon explained why. He described the fire in Hartford. He explained his father’s death, his moving in with Abe and Mirabelle and Uncle Nate. He explained the parts he wanted to and left out the rest.

  Mabel listened. She knew many people who had lost loved ones because of the war and what had happened across the ocean. She didn’t say she was sorry. She listened instead.

  Sheldon explained that film was still made of nitrate and that it was as prone to burning as ever. Mabel had never thought about fires before. Now that she had, she still wasn’t afraid of them. She also wasn’t afraid of the dark or being trampled under fleeing people. Meanwhile, there was a specific film she wanted to see.

  “It’s time to go to the movies, Sheldon,” she said gently.

  * * *

  There was a fine drizzle that night, like the mist from a waterfall. She and Sheldon stood in line wrapped in worsted wool. It was dark and the city lights reflected off the glimmering streets. The men wore hats and the women wore scarves. Sheldon’s collar was up, and he looked to Mabel like a turtle in retreat. She told him so, and he didn’t disagree.

  Stoic and full of masculine pride, Sheldon proceeded to the front of the line. That pride failed him at the ticket booth. He wanted to leave. Mabel wasn’t having it. She placed her gloved hands on the counter and leaned forward, and she spoke loudly enough for Sheldon to hear every word.

  “How many exits does your theater have, please?”

  “Ma’am?” asked the ticket woman with the cat-eye glasses.

  “I experienced a fire in a movie theater once, and theaters scare me. But I want to see the movie. Can you tell me whether there’s an emergency exit, please?”

  Sheldon watched her lie for him and absorb his fears.

  “Two entrances at the top of the stairs and two exits at the bottom on either side of the screen. We’ve never had a fire,” the woman said, her tone flat.

  Sheldon could feel the line growing restless behind them.

  “It’s fine,” he said to her. “Let’s get seats.”

  “Two on the aisle,” Mabel said. “The left side, preferably. Toward the back and near the exit, please.”

  “You can sit where you like, ma’am. This ain’t a communist country.”

  * * *

  Mabel and Sheldon watched the movie.

  Gregory Peck, as Phil “Skylar” Green, is tall, dark, and handsome. In the opening scene, the audience learns he is a widower with an only son, and Mabel held Sheldon’s hand tighter. The father and son are in New York so Phil can write a long feature story on anti-Semitism, a topic suggested by the magazine’s editor. Phil doesn’t want to do it. The topic was dry and saturated with numbers and polls and statistics, and he doesn’t like taking on an assignment that he can’t grab and make his own. Phil isn’t Jewish, but his best friend from childhood—Dave—is. Dave is a captain in the army and still overseas.

  Phil explains his difficulties to his sick mother. In all the other stories he’s written, he lived the experience. He’d been a part of it and had learned what to write. It was during his complaint to his mother that a light bulb goes off and he finds the right approach: He’ll pretend to be Jewish and see what it feels like.

  It turns out that it doesn’t feel good.

  Having fallen in love with Kathy, the editor’s niece and a divorcee with no children, the two are fast on their way to a wedding, but her upper-class Christian family isn’t comfortable with Phil’s assumed Jewish identity. Kathy wants Phil to play it down with friends and family, and not mention it to her preferred wedding venue, the Flume Inn, which didn’t accept Jewish patrons. It wasn’t like Phil was actually Jewish, she says. He could surely drop the act from time to time so they could live like normal people. But Phil won’t have it.

  After his son is tormented at school for being a “dirty Jew,” Kathy tried to comfort the boy by saying, “It’s not true, you aren’t a dirty Jew! You’re no more Jewish than I am!” and Phil seethes. He turns his anger toward the Flume Inn, driving up there and demanding to know whether the hotel was indeed “restricted.” The manager calmly asks whether Phil was inquiring to be sure that Jews weren’t there or whether he was inquiring because he was a Jew. Phil shakes with anger and the manager—taking his silence as an answer—rings his bell. As Phil stands there helplessly, the bellhop removes Phil’s bag from the lobby and places it out on the street without a word.

  As Gregory Peck stands there, impotent and fuming, Sheldon saw Abe on the screen. He also saw the power of film. He saw his own story being told for the first time. And he was in awe.

  When Phil returns broken by his experience at the inn, Kathy sees this and insists they talk. She is tired of being told she is wrong all the time and she needs him to stop this foolishness of pretending he is Jewish for a mere magazine story.

  Phil, of course, is tired of her being wrong all the time.

  Phil doesn’t apologize, because he is angered by Kathy’s easy complacency. After little Tommy was bullied, she had been wrong. Very wrong. “You only assured him that he’s the most wonderful of all creatures, a white Christian American. You instantly gave him that lovely taste of superiority, the poison that millions of parents drop in the minds of children!”

  Kathy fights back. She accuses Phil of thinking all along that she is an anti-Semite.

  He insists that he doesn’t. “It’s just that I’ve come to see that the nice people who aren’t, who despise it and detest it and deplore it and protest their own innocence, nevertheless help it along and wonder why it grows.” That’s the biggest discovery he’s made, Phil tells her. About the nice people, the good people. The silent complicity.

  * * *

  When the film was over and the lights came back on, so too did the theater’s colors. Mabel and Sheldon were holding hands. She smiled at him as they stood, and he helped her with her coat.

  They left through the entrance and returned to a bracing cold night and a gusty breeze. The mist had turned into a light flurry of snow that blew across the streetlights like radical sta
rs breaking free of convention and conformity.

  It was only nine o’clock and Mabel wasn’t expected home until eleven. They found an Italian restaurant nearby and ducked inside.

  A waiter sat them at a table with a red cloth and lit the candle that was between them. He left them with menus and brought water after taking their drink order. Gregory Peck had made Sheldon long for a martini and Mabel joined him.

  She wanted to know everything. What he thought. What he felt. Who he was.

  He wasn’t quick to answer.

  “What did you think?” he asked.

  “I think it was shocking,” she said, crossing her legs. From Sheldon’s angle, her thigh was visible as the bottom edge of the slit on her blue skirt fell away. No one could see but him. The experience was his alone.

  “I had no idea that it was so bad that they had to make a movie about it,” Mabel said. “I always knew we were on the outside looking in, but I never really thought this could change. It makes me wonder if we’re the same as Europe.”

  “We’re not,” said Sheldon without a moment’s hesitation.

  Mabel. Her name was old-fashioned even in 1947. Mirabelle had been right about names. They conquer and control. A woman like Mabel was more like Mirabelle than some great-aunt. She needed a name with three syllables, a name to be announced on arrival. Maybe something Italian. Or Portuguese. Biblical, perhaps, but one that evoked a lingering taste of the sea. Exotic. Blue. Watery.

  Leonora.

  Maybe when they have a daughter . . .

  The drinks came before Sheldon could finish his answer or his daydream. Mabel removed a cigarette from a silver case, and Sheldon lit it with his father’s lighter.

  Mabel looked at him with a wry smile. “You don’t think so?”

  “No,” Sheldon said, recovering. “The movie made me feel great. After everything’s that’s happened, I feel like someone’s noticing. Someone’s saying we’re not going to stand for this anymore. We know what this leads to. Someone’s saying that we need to get better. America is telling us . . . that we belong . . . and maybe it isn’t an unrequited love after all.”

  If we had heard this earlier, Sheldon thought, maybe Abe would still be alive. Maybe Mirabelle wouldn’t have tried so hard to be anything but Jewish. Maybe Nate wouldn’t have tried so hard to fit in that he disappeared as his own man. Maybe the dead would be alive and all the beauty they took with them would surround us all here and now.

  Maybe.

  Instead, Sheldon was living in this version of the world with a building in Gramercy, a buddy named Bill Harmon, and the woman he is going to marry sitting across from him. But not yet. Not too soon. He doesn’t want to spook her.

  “America is the greatest party going,” Sheldon said, trying to sound suave. “And I think the night’s still young.”

  Acknowledgments and Denials

  Thank you to my wife, Camilla, for everything one might ever thank another person for. Thanks to my kids, Julian and Clara, for appreciating what I have to give and being understanding when it’s not enough. Thanks to Rebecca Carter; PJ Mark; Bill Scott-Kerr; Lauren Wein; Jaime Levine; David Hough; Marianne Vincent; everyone at HMH and Transworld, the editors, copy editors, and cover designers; and the never-thanked booksellers who have, for a decade, wedged copies of my novels into readers’ hands and made my life as a novelist possible. God bless you.

  Meanwhile, no thanks go to all the scholars who blew me off and didn’t respond to my letters of inquiry in the mistaken impression (I can only assume) that their peer-reviewed papers would have more of an impact than this novel would and who didn’t recognize that art is one of the best vehicles for the movement of ideas into society. Let’s consider any mistakes in this book theirs, shall we? Oh . . . let’s.

  The line “If they’re laughing, how can they bludgeon you to death?” was stolen from Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks is also known to have said, “Knowing who to steal from is an art.” Who he stole that from I have no idea, but I suspect foul play.

  The idea that newspapers “don’t tell us what to think, but tell us what to think about” was first noted by Bernard C. Cohen in his 1963 book, The Press and Foreign Policy.

  The long quote from Mark Twain about the Colt Armory is taken, as claimed, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

  The B-24 bomber wasn’t delivered to Iceland until September of 1941. My June deployment is fictional but suited the story. I was willing to stretch the facts here because weirdness like this happens all the time in war. Need more? Try my second novel, The Girl in Green.

  The statistics about Grossinger’s were taken from Tania Grossinger’s Growing Up at Grossinger’s (2008, Skyhorse Publishing, New York). The numbers, according to Ms. Grossinger, reflect the mid-1940s, not the early 1940s, but I think they are close enough for rock and roll and I couldn’t find better. I took some liberties with Grossinger’s grounds and the locations of rooms at the hotel to suit the needs of the story. I visited the remains of the hotel in the summer of 2019. Everything had been destroyed and I was probably the last interested party—other than the workers—to see the debris being cleared away.

  Although this is a work of fiction, the following all happened more or less as portrayed in the story—if not to my characters, at least to somebody: Hartford’s industrial history; Joseph’s World War I experiences; the New England hurricane of 1938; all facts and figures and dialogue about anti-Semitism or racism in America as well as the laws, policies, and genocide against the Jews in Europe; the general story of the Borscht Belt and the birth of modern comedy (which no scholars seem to link to the concurrent tragedy of the Holocaust, which the former scholar in me finds weird and is a research agenda begging for attention); the stories of Neversink and the Valley of the Dammed; Americans joining the RCAF, who were later called Gun Jumpers for “jumping the gun” and going to war; the RCAF’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic (though I invented Abe’s story); America’s deep unwillingness (by both parties) to get involved in World War II until the Japanese bombed us and Hitler declared war on us; the fact that Jewish immigration was treated (outrageously and fatally) as a national security threat, much as Muslim immigration is treated like that today; and Laura Z. Hobson’s novel-turned-movie that, in my opinion, laid the foundations for gonzo journalism (before Hunter S. Thompson) by having Phil Green be the story he was writing.

  The story of the Lost Battalion and Cher Ami is also true. What Mr. Knightly did not mention to his class was that years later, after the war, Major Whittlesey committed suicide by jumping into the ocean from a ship traveling between New York and Havana. I don’t know why.

  Abe’s thoughts on Judaism are strongly influenced by the writings of Rabbi Milton Steinberg and . . . well . . . my own thoughts, I suppose.

  Lenny’s reference to the Escapist is a nod to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In a way that I don’t entirely understand, I feel like this book is in conversation with that one.

  Lenny’s comedy routines were written by me and were “ahead of their time” in style but I wrote them a bit anachronistically to better fit the needs of this story, to suit contemporary tastes, and . . . because they made me chuckle.

  Speaking of which, Jerry Seinfeld mastered the art of telling jokes about nothing. But I think Lenny has a point and there’s still an argument for telling jokes about something.

  The term “twilight crimes” and the definition provided at the beginning of the book are mine. For a long time, Twilight Crimes was the working title of this book. I hope the term and its meanings catch on.

  This book is indebted to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, which tells the story of Sheldon’s final adventure. It took me years to understand his early life. Now I do and I hope that the readers of Norwegian by Night have come to know him better. For those who have yet to read that novel . . . more Sheldon awaits you (you lucky devils).

  And for the record, Santa is alive and well, and loves this book and
thinks it would make an excellent Christmas present.

  —Derek B. Miller, Oslo, Norway

  About the Author

  © Erlend Mikael Sæverud

  Derek B. Miller is a novelist and social scientist. Born in Boston, he studied at Sarah Lawrence College, The Hebrew University, Georgetown, Oxford, and Geneva, earning a PhD summa cum laude in international relations. He worked on peace and security for think tanks, diplomatic missions, and the United Nations and is the CWA Dagger Award–winning author of Norwegian by Night; the critically acclaimed The Girl in Green and American by Day; the science fiction novel Radio Life; and the Audible Original novel Quiet Time. Miller lives in Barcelona, Spain, with his wife and two children.

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